Scaling Customer Support Without Sacrificing Quality: 15 Tips
Just when you have your whole customer service process working beautifully, things inevitably change. What was a finely balanced system starts to wobble, and suddenly you’re in danger of drifting from consistently delivering high quality support into the crowded swamp of mediocre service.
Scaling customer support without sacrificing quality is possible, but it takes deliberate effort and thoughtful actions. The first challenge is to understand what it means to scale support, and the second challenge is to realize when you need to scale (ideally before everything breaks).
We’ll address how to meet both challenges below.
What does it mean to scale customer support?
Scaling customer support means expanding your team's ability to handle increasing customer inquiries efficiently without compromising service quality.
There are several situations that may trigger the need to scale a service function:
Adding new customers: Normal business growth can generate higher volumes of customer service interactions, even if nothing else changes.
Covering additional time zones: If your customers are geographically dispersed or if your product usage spreads outside your business hours, maintaining quality may demand support staff working additional hours.
Encouraging more conversations: Some business decisions may generate support demands, such as adding VIP support or launching a free plan.
Offering new support channels: Adding live chat, social media, or phone support can increase your workload, whether or not additional customers are added.
Supporting additional products or services: Especially in the SaaS world, product changes are linked to customer service changes. Customers who have not emailed in for months or years may suddenly need help after a product update.
Whatever creates the demand for scaling, you will need a way to know if your approach is working. That starts with knowing what a great customer service experience should look like.
Defining the quality standard you'll use while you're scaling
Scaling customer support efficiently begins with answering this question: “How can we deliver significantly more customer service experiences at a consistently high level of quality given the resources we have available?”
In order to answer that question, you’ll need to know:
How many more experiences (roughly) will you need to deliver?
What do you mean by “high quality”?
What are the resources you have available (or that you could get)?
You will need to define a consistent, agreed upon, internal way to measure what your team considers to be top-quality service.
When you are scaling service, your specific definition of good service may need to change. Metrics and goals that work for a four-person team may just not be feasible for a 10-person team. Similarly, the quality markers at 10 people will be different than those at 25.
Picking realistic new targets and building a new rubric that still reflects the underlying values of your team and company is the challenge. Start by reviewing what you know about your current and potential customers: What do they most care about? What matters less to them?
There will necessarily be some educated guesswork in setting a new standard, but your goal is to figure out where you can afford to lower your standards without significantly affecting the customer experience.
For example, there is no point pushing for a 10-minute response time if your customers would be just as happy with a one-hour response time. Change that time standard, and use the saved energy to focus where it matters most.
Create a proposed new quality measure and discuss it with your team. Are the goals achievable? Do they match up with what you know about your current customers? How many people will you need in order to deliver on it?
With your agreed quality measure in hand (or a set of measures for each channel), you can begin to work on a system that will help your team meet that standard at scale.
15 ways to scale customer support without sacrificing quality
You might be expecting 50% more customers in the next year, but it’s unlikely you’ll be given 50% more customer service staff to support them all. Fortunately, hiring additional staff is only one tool in the scaler’s tool kit.
Below, you'll find 15 ideas you can use to scale customer support. The most effective approach will almost certainly be to combine several of these strategies. You may also start with one or two and then deploy others later.
1. Set up auto-replies
Small teams that don't have a lot of support volume can usually reply back to customers quickly. If that's been your situation, you may not have needed auto-replies in the past — customers have never had to wait so long that they started to wonder if their inquiry actually reached you.
As volume grows, though, auto-replies are a great tool for building confidence with customers. A great auto-reply lets customers know you're on the case, sets expectations for when they'll receive a reply, and can even suggest self-help options they can reference in the meantime.
2. Redesign your contact pages and forms
A clear, complete question can often be answered much more quickly than a vague one. A good contact form can increase your chances of receiving clear, complete questions by prompting users to provide all of the necessary details. This limits the amount of back-and-forth you'll have to engage in, reducing your overall volume.
Additionally, a thoughtful and well-designed contact page can point customers to alternative ways they can get help — such as a knowledge base, community forum, or AI agent — which can also help reduce your overall volume.
3. Give your team more authority
When a customer writes in asking for a refund, is your team allowed to process the refund, or do they have to seek approval from a manager? Barriers between receiving a request and acting on it delay replies to customers and create more work for your team.
As you scale, it may be time to write clear guidelines for your team on how to handle more sensitive requests, and then give them the authority to take the necessary actions. After that, look for other places where your policies are using up time that would be better spent helping customers.
4. Level up your team
Do you have agents who are consistently able to close far more conversations than others? Look for ways to share their skills and techniques to level up the whole team. Consider asking them to document some of their techniques, or have them shadow other team members to provide specific contextual tips.
If each team member could handle just a few more conversations in a day, that might be enough to create the scale you need, at least temporarily. Spend some time reviewing your customer service training and look for opportunities to strengthen your team.
5. Invest in better tools
If you've been using a shared email address to manage support requests, you'll likely want to invest in a help desk as you scale. Help desks come with tons of features that increase efficiency, improve collaboration, and eliminate redundant work, letting your team accomplish more in less time.
6. Employ automation
Another benefit of implementing a help desk is that it allows you to start automating some of your work.
You can start simply with basic workflows that automatically delete spam emails or route incoming messages to the right team based on an input selected in your contact form. While handling these types of tasks may only take your team seconds, those seconds add up to lots of wasted time as your volume increases.
When you're ready to get more advanced, you can use AI to do things like automatically answer questions from customers or create draft replies that your team can review and send.
Modern AI is much better than the rule-based chatbots of the past. It's trained on your help center content and your replies to previous support requests, so its answers are much more accurate. It can be a real game-changer when it comes to scaling support.
7. Consolidate data across your tools
Another place where seconds add up as you scale is having to look in multiple tools to get the information you need to answer customers' questions.
Look for a help desk that can integrate with the other tools you need to reference in order to deliver support — such as your CRM, billing tool, or ecommerce platform — to consolidate all of that data and view it alongside support requests.
8. Review your approach to queue management
If your approach to the queue has been first-in-first-out, scaling is the perfect time to rethink your approach. There are plenty of other approaches to handling a busy queue that can help you get the most out of your team’s efforts.
9. Create a knowledge base (or expand your existing one)
Building out a comprehensive, well-designed, and clear knowledge base requires effort upfront but pays off endlessly. A great knowledge base helps everyone: Your customers can find the answers they need on their own, your team can link to it in replies, and if you're using AI, it ensures the answers it provides are accurate.
10. Build a community
A community gives your customers a place to share ideas, brainstorm, solve problems, and collaborate. It can also be really helpful for scaling support because customers will often answer each other's questions — and even come up with approaches your team never considered.
11. Create saved replies (or improve the ones you already use)
Many questions are asked repeatedly, no matter how good your knowledge base is, and saved replies can help your team answer them more quickly. Making those replies clearer, more concise, and more accurate will scale up their impact enormously.
12. Hire more agents
Sometimes you just need more people. An undersized team that can’t keep up will not give consistently good service, no matter how good the individuals on the team are.
If you are going to hire support folks, try to hire them in advance of growth. Give them time to get up to speed before the real rush so the results will be better for everyone.
13. Try whole company support
When we were first starting to scale at Help Scout, everyone in the company, including our three founders, pitched in regularly to help answer support requests out of necessity.
While we've evolved how we approach whole company support over time, having that extra help in the queue was invaluable early on.
14. Consider outsourcing
Using a third party BPO to expand your customer service team (either seasonally or ongoing) can add enormous capacity at a much smaller cost than hiring new full-time team members.
15. Create demand-based schedules
Sometimes the problem is not about absolute capacity but about a mismatch between support capacity and support demand. Shifting team members' schedules (assuming they don't mind the change) to different hours or onto weekend shifts can help you manage the queue more effectively.
Want more tips? Check out this webinar on scaling support, featuring Veronica Armstrong of Lovepop, Katherine Pan of Kickstarter, and Help Scout's Mathew Patterson.
Scaling support with intent pays the growth rent
Successfully scaling a customer support team might mean letting go of some behaviors and approaches that will just not work at a larger scale. The trick is to replace them with new approaches that achieve the same underlying features of a quality customer experience.
With a clear sense of team values and a well-defined measure of quality, a team can transition into new forms as the company grows, without losing the customer-centric focus so central to its success.
